A new thread on Webmasterworld may be worth a read for further thoughts re enhancing Drupal forum.
Initial post re a guy enhancing his forum software for SEO; at its heart, post says:
Simplify, simplify, simplify
Really, if there is no real need for it get it out.
(So often good practice when you're creating; Strunk n White on writing being quoted here)
A key thing being, it seems, to aim for only only the info in posts, plus titles, maybe meta tags, to be seen and indexed by search engines.
Having forum as part of warp and weave of a Drupal site could be a boon; links via taxonomy terms etc leading to threads and posts.
Another poster comments:
what really gets me angry is, that you MUST optimize your out-of-the-box open source software these days for 3-4 days until you have something good SEOed... kind of bad!
(Ooh dear, even lists Drupal there in big 5)
Thread's at:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/community_building/3279198.htm
One thing that's occurred to me: h1 tag should be important for SEO, with one per page, and covering what the page is about.
For forum, would it be possible to have h1 tag for the title of a thread? (Yet, no h1 tags in lists of thread titles)
Comments
Having more than one h1 tag
Having more than one h1 tag per page is not seen as a good practice, because you dilute the importance of each header. try to answer the question : "What is this page talking about?". You should find the answer in the h1 tag (especially search engine wise).
Having several h2,h3..... is fine though and already used in the menus and the comment title.
Interesting post... find it
Interesting post... find it odd that Drupal would be mentioned, but it's encouraging that he sees it as up there with massive projects like phpbb. : P
I just know that I've had untouched Drupal sites ranking on the first page on Google for piddly posts on things I never even tried to rank high on... that's without 3-4 days optimization, wherever that nebulous number came from.
I'd love to see a concise list of things you can do to make Drupal more SEF... I know I do a few things, but it usually takes me about 15 minutes, not 72 hours.
Shrug. I setup my pages for
Shrug.
I setup my pages for humans first, and bots second. If it's useful to my users, it'll be on my page, bots be damned. And if it's not useful to my users, it shouldn't be on the page in the first place.
As for appropriate things like
<h1>tags, I do that anyway. Except I file it under "Good HTML" rather than "Good SEO".Honestly, I think a lot of people worry way too much about little SEO details. If your site's crawlable by Google & Yahoo, that's stuff's just icing on the cake. The actual content on the page is by far the most important part of getting into search results, and incidentally, that's exactly what users care about too! :)
Reading the thread a bit more closely...
Damn, I'd better get rid of all the links back to my home page!
The ones that actually matter don't.
I do the opposite: I use as few image links as possible. Where most forums use an
<img>to display a 'Reply' button, I instead use code like<a>Reply</a>. Then I use some CSS to give that<a>dimensions (usingdisplay: block) and a graphical 'button' background. This does a few things: One, it works nicely if images are turned off, or if using a screen reader or text-only browser. Two, it saves a small amount of bandwidth, as it only has to download the background image once for multiple, different buttons. Three, it saves me time not having to create so many different graphical buttons - I can reuse that same background image all I want and only have to enter the button text into my HTML.The footer isn't the right place either, a separate .js file is. :)
If your users never look deeper than 1 or 2 pages, I'd say it's the content of your site that's fundamentally flawed. ;)
On "multiple links to the
On "multiple links to the same content"... it seems like you know this already, but for the sake of others... what's being referred to here is several pages on the same site with different URLs and the same content. Links all leading to the same URL isn't bad, and a bunch of links all pointing back at your home page are good. You just don't want crawlers finding your home page, node/1, a node with path home, and maybe your old revision where it was called welcome. Then you've got 4 pages with duplicate content... not good for business.
not shruggin
For group about improving Forum in Drupal, I reckon the post and thread merit more than a "Shrug". Some ideas worth considering; seems the first poster not a rookie.
And if anyone indeed has multiple URLs pointing to home page (or any other page), should take out the dupes (even two is really one too many).
Content king re SEO, of course.
But sites employing lots of SEO techniques can do annoyingly well (I see pages with zero content ranking in google - yes, partly a google issue and maybe someday they'll fix, but ongoing cat n mouse game).
I do have forum threads/posts doing well in couple of forums on sites run by joomla - with rather horrible URLs, and not much SEO benefit other than main - head - title coming from titles of posts. So content major, plus I believe internal links, but if can get more help from seo, that would be fine too.
To maximise chances of being in SERPs, SEO is important. Much of SEO is also about good site design, inc one h1 tag around text that shows what the page is about. Again: is it possible to achieve this with forum? Might just need some code in theme for title of first post in thread; haven't checked if this is simply done, including with no more than one h1 on pages where have lists of thread topics.
Need for SEO depends partly on how competitive the subject is.
If Pill popping Porn stars playing Poker (really, any one of the three Ps as guy I know puts it), liable to need all the help possible.
Would be interesting to learn re what takes 3 or 4 days for guy to SEO software inc Drupal; would seem a chance for the poster to contribute to D development.